Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-01-20/In the media

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As a complement to this post, in this page you can find a list of Spanish media reports or interviews regarding the 15th anniversary of Wikipedia. --Hispalois (talk) 20:45, 24 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW, there's another myth out there that probably needs debunking: no, Wikipedia did not kill off the traditional encyclopedias, like Encyclopædia Britannica, although Wikipedia's success did EB no favors. The mortal blow came from Microsoft's Encarta, which provided a "good enough" encyclopedia at the fraction of the cost of a set of EB. The latter had become by the mid-20th century simply a symbol for upper-middle class Americans to show their devotion to education, with minimal effort given to keeping it up to date & accurate; when Microsoft created their own encyclopedia -- which might not have the reputation of EB, but was good enough for student use & to answer basic questions -- EB instantly was in trouble but could not respond meaningfully out of concern for alienating its extensive network of salespeople. Even after eliminating this network as unnecessary, EB still could not reinvent itself to effectively compete on the Internet. By the time the first Wikipedia article was written, EB was fighting for its existence & all Wikipedia did was administer the coup de grace. -- llywrch (talk) 18:47, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'll say this about Britannica. Those are some beautiful books and there's nothing quite like them. It's understandable libraries wouldn't have wanted to get new ones often. It is kind of challenging to find anything in them. The Micropedia doesn't have enough detail and the Macropedia has too few articles, making it hard to know where to look.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 20:22, 25 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]